Who
Ann Shea Kent
(BFA,MA Ed)
What
“First of all, you should know that you can’t blow it. Anything that you do to help your kids along the road to deeper understanding, putting their thoughts into words and discovering their own self-efficacy, is where it’s at. The play — that is, the final performance — is not the thing. The thing, in this case, is the kids and their sense of discovery — of themselves and of the subject at hand.”
~ From “PLAY: Imagination in Cognition and Art In Schools” (2021; unpublished)
“… Expressiveness is a function of understanding, and the ability to share that understanding. There is little difference between reading with expression and acting in a play. In fact, it’s the only rule of acting that I gave my students — Oh well, besides standing up tall and lifting their faces, but those are more akin to syntax; I’m addressing understanding here — I instructed them that they must understand the meaning of every word they say. If they didn’t understand something, then they needed to search out the meaning. You can’t communicate what you are saying if you don’t understand it! And the more deeply you understand what you’re saying, the more effective you’ll be at communicating what you mean. The same could be said for writing, and of course, that search for meaning brings students right to the core of literacy.”
~ From “On Meaning, Authenticity and Engagement” (2009)
Why
“The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”
~ Immanuel Kant (1781)
“Imagination feeds our ability to ask the big questions, to think large and deep … wonder is the fuel that feeds our desire to understand the world.”
~ Karen Gallas (2003)
“It [is] not possible here — even in prose — to portray all that goes on in the learning that happens through participation in the arts… neither is it possible to render in poetry the truth of its fullness.”
~ Shirley Brice Heath (1999)
“Once upon a time, oral storytelling ruled. It was the medium through which people learned their history, settled their arguments, and came to make sense of the phenomena of their world… but the respect for storytelling as a tool of learning was almost forgotten.”
~ National Council of Teachers of English (1997)
“… before there was school, there were stories …”
~ Vivian Gussin Paley (2004)
“We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”
~ Tony Wagner (2013)
”The arts are not extracurricular…The arts are not extra… I don’t see how people without loose associations and flights of ideas get much done.”
~ Mark Vonnegut (2010)
“What I mean is a reconsideration of our understanding of the role art naturally plays in our thinking lives, a recollection of ourselves as essentially creative beings, and a re-imagination of what kind of world we’d like to make for our kids at school . . . as well as the kind of world they’ll go on to create for themselves in turn.”
– Ann Shea Kent (2021, unpublished), PLAY: Imagination and Art in Schools
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